Due to recent advances in technology, computer users are now able to enjoy many features that provide an improved user experience, such as playing various media and multimedia content on their personal or laptop computers. For example, most computers today are able to play compact discs (CDs) so users can listen to their favorite musical artists while working on their computers. Many computers are also equipped with digital versatile disc (DVD) drives enabling users to watch movies.
In some multimedia environments, a computer has access to a computer-readable medium storing compressed media files such as Moving Picture Experts Group audio layer-3 (MP3) files and WINDOWS MEDIA technologies audio (WMA) files. When the media files are rendered on a computer, the computer typically has access to a database storing metadata describing albums, artists, genres, years, or the like for the media files. The computer typically organizes the media files into playlists based on the metadata when the compressed media files are played on the computer. For example, in the case of audio media files, the files may be organized by album, artist, genre, year, or some user specified selection and ordering. This allows users to easily have access to all of their content regardless of whether or not the users manually created a playlist.
However, when compressed media files are transferred from the computer to an optical format such as CD or DVD for playback on a portable CD player, car receiver, DVD player or other consumer electronic devices having a low-power processor, limited memory and often limited display and user input capabilities, the media files traditionally lose much of the functionality offered by metadata databases hosted on devices with greater computing power. The playlists revert to nothing more than a sequential list of files to be played.
Further, a playlist having a large number of files is difficult for a low-powered device to navigate. For example, some existing systems store metadata separate from media files on a computer-readable medium. To render the media files and display metadata associated with the media files, the existing systems have to seek to at least two separate areas of the computer-readable medium. If the rendering device has a limited buffer for disk seek and find operations, then such rendering devices cannot navigate large playlists. For example, a rendering device such as a low end portable CD player only contains an 8 bit 1 MHz processor with 100 kilobytes of working memory with a five second seek time.
Other systems store the metadata within the media files. To obtain the metadata for the media files, the existing systems have to open each media file in the playlist to obtain and display the metadata. Opening every media file in a playlist is slow and increases complexity. The existing systems fail to provide a playlist structure that supports an unbounded number of media files and is capable of playback on even the lowest power devices.
Accordingly, a system for enabling efficient navigation of large playlists is desired to address one or more of these and other disadvantages.